The Low Road
by Mess
Summary: Integral smokes, Alucard is obsessive and egotistical, and a crossroads is reached. Spoilers for end of anime, though it uses manga requirements for vamping.


** The Low Road**

My Master is holding a fine Cuban cigar in one hand and a modified Baretta 92FS Inox semiautomatic handgun in the other. The burning stick disturbs me as its scent slowly re-conquers her clothing from Walter's increasingly desperate ministrations. The firearm pointed at my temple? Less so. We - the _royal _we, no less, which includes this vassal by divine decree - are pretending at the moment that I would not be amused by being shot in the head. It is to be Understood now that, were my Master to suddenly render me headless, she would not have to cope with a baker's dozen of ghouls on her own. Her untimely fit of wrath would also show this evil wicked thing his place instead of just tickling. 

Heheheh. 

Does it matter either way? I snatch her fix away from her for the hell of it (I do many things for hell. It's in my nature). That's why she pulls the trigger, and I'm knocked back to observe her turn on the advancing horde with a slight red film over my eyes. Fortunately I have more those. The pain itself is nothing. I could get up as the droplets of my brain which have become acquainted with the wall gather themselves - but now I think I'm in the mood for a floor show. And didn't she make her choice? It's always _her_ choice in the end, you know. It's not _my_ fault that her choices are sometimes maddening at best. 

Those damnable cigars, for instance. Caught up in the principle of the thing now that she's reclaimed it, she's forced to clench the Cohiba between her teeth before taking up the MP5-N assault rifle that was strapped to her back. I wonder if she can breathe all that well like that - if the chemicals burn when they meet the months-old scar on her throat. Pain means so much more to mortals. Hmm. After all these years the human respiratory system is something of a mystery to me, although I rooted through more than a few sets of lungs before the vivisections all started to look the same. 

Her breathing has been getting more shallow. Since we broke out her out of the Tower there have been many more Cohibas. I know this because I let her order me to fetch them while she was still in lockup with a token amount of ribbing (well, for myself, that is). My Master almost died along with her organization, and she needs all the control she can get right now, including to ability to make me her (ugh) errand boy with a Mona Lisa smile. I can read her like a book. 

I know, for example, that if she started to give me _real_ orders as I've been requesting since I finally stole her back from those bastard mortals then she might give me an order we'd both like. An order she'd regret. It is, after all, her job to stop me. It makes her feel better about herself that after all that's happened she can still stop me. 

... and I know intellectually that someone really _ought _to stop me. It's just that, as a vampire, carnage is something I can't really bring myself to care about beyond a professional kind of pride. 

She's raining down destruction on the horde that troops sluggishly through the doorway of this wreck of a castle. My Master is an impassive judge, jury, and executioner unless you know her (and I do) enough to see the evangelist's fire simmering with self-satisfaction beneath her skin. It's not as charming or beautiful or erotic as I know death can be - just billowing dust. These creatures are trash, after all. Nothing more. Yet I still sit up and chuckle, because it seems to me that the little girl is trying to prove a point at this particular tea party. A ludicrous one at that. 

We're playing pretend today, you see, like she doesn't need me. I find this entertaining, so I let her know that by reclining on the crumbling castle wall with brutally smug nonchalance. Not many things entertain me - indeed, most just make me wish I were killing something. That's the _real _reason that I, sadistic bastard that I am (Heheheh. That's one thing about the twenty-first century. Nothing's ever couched in metaphor. No 'eccentrics', no 'fallen women', no 'ungentlemanly fellows'... just sadistic bastards and unrepentant scum. It lacks a certain charm, yet manages to make up for itself in novelty), don't just kill her. This latest Hellsing has miscalculated by assuming that her authority can be built on the seals alone, without the strait jackets and the cattle prods of her ancestors.

The dust is everywhere, and the candlelight renders her eyes invisible through her glasses. She's smiling, slightly, as the bullets clatter to the floor. And I can't help but be impressed with how strong she is for a mortal, cleaning up this little mess so unworthy of our talents because she's got nothing else to work with but her own hands and.... me. 

Stubborn witch. She drops the rifle once the mundane death-moans are done with but takes the cigar back up with an unspoken smirk. Clearly she expects me to get back up and be put out. I am often convinced that her smoking at least began as a clever ploy against me, suffused with plausible deniability and a thousand of the other tricks of subtle needling she's learned over the years. I wouldn't put it past her to do that. My Master is quite gifted. Her tortures.. her tortures are nothing sort of _brilliant_. 

In any case, I believe that she smokes in order to remind me of her mortality, as if it weren't apparent enough from that laughably breakable frame. My Master wishes to remind me that her lifespan is her own, not mine, by slowly tainting it - emphasizing the shortness of the breaths she'll take. Integral thinks she's clever, doesn't she? Standing in defiance of everything I have to offer, making it oh-so so crystal clear that she revels in the inevitability of her own decay. That she'll grow ugly, and tainted, and poisoned, and weak, and she _chose_ to do it when all she'd have to say is one single word and... She _revels_ in it, parading about her mayfly's worth of years like a tattered battle-standard. 

Not that that's entirely a bad thing. An adaptable cruelty is a gift far too rare among the living - or, for that matter, dead - to be trained into someone. Witness the policewoman waiting outside who is an unfortunately open book of disapproval and mild jealousy. She could snap a man in half with three fingers and twist tanks into avant-garde sculptures with her bare hands, yet lacks the wherewithal to even attempt to irk me.

I laugh often for no visible reason, as I do now - the chuckle of one minute ago flowing in to a full-bodied bark. It throws her off. She looks at me impatiently anyways. Is she waiting for me to move? Heh. 

"Alucard, Hellsing needs none of your... 'breakdowns' in the middle of..."

Her gloved hand is motioning at me with impatience. My Master would make, it is needless to say, a much better vampire than Victoria. 

But she isn't a vampire. And I've been too pensive about to it notice....

Walter and the policewoman, it seems, did not reach the master freak in the great hall after all. The bullet from his revolver grazes her arm as I've pushed her aside before I can think of him. Fucking TRASH! These beasts know nothing! A real vampire doesn't need to kill humans with guns. Hellforsaken man-made legends - these fucking machines and their hubris! 

I glower, standing where she had been before I knocked her to the floor. The smell of the Cohiba has gone acrid against the tweed of her suit. 

"Did you think you could do that and remain living? Arrogant mongrel." 

A purebred hellhound bites his head clean off. There are no entrails - just dust. Sometimes when I want to play that disappoints me, but there is no time for extracurricular activities right now. 

It's invisible behind the burnt porcelain of her cheeks, but I can tell that she's upset. Her arm is bleeding, and her blackened lungs are breathing hard. She hadn't expected that. Her senses haven't been honed to combat outside of the boardroom for months now. And now another bandage. Another scar. And her blood, which has become a living, breathing, intoxicating entity of it's own permeates the room__ and if I could have just have a bit, just a lick, I could....

I help her stand up, and she controls herself admirably as one more illusion of power is taken from her. It hits me as I hold her just how easy it would be to seduce her right now - to myself or to chaos or to whatever lies between. I have her in just the right clinch to whisper very dark nothings into her ear. The iron maiden has nothing left but myself and the shadows, she's seen so little but my kind in so very _very_ long. I'm the key to every dream of hers that could ever come true, and I know it. She might be too weak now to stop herself from setting me free. One word, one nod, one momentary flicker of assent from the corner of her eyes - oh, was that an eyelash Master? I misunderstood... heheheh - and she would bathe in the blood of her enemies and grind their bones to dust beneath her feet. I could bring her fire and chaos and darkness and the hounds of war. I could blight this city with a plague of vengeful locusts, or storm into their dreams and break them. All she needs now is something to make her feel in control again, and then I could prevail upon her for just one nip and I would be _free_... 

Or could give her death and life besides. And though only mortal paladins slay devils I can picture, in my mind's eye, all the legions of hell faltering beneath that clockwork single-mindedness.

...fuck. Perhaps she wants me to seduce her. She'd win then - my iron maiden placed firmly on the high road forever. I can't read her mind, but... for all her self-imposed blindness she's no naive waif. Surely she'd understand what would happen. Just once she'd have no choice at all, would she? She'd be set firmly on the path of the saints and martyrs until the day God inevitably called his lamb to sacrifice. And I'm practically the only man she knows besides Walter. My Master would never dream of stooping to one of those meat-market pickup... 

Hah! Oh no, little girl - I'm too clever for that. You won't be delivered from trespasses quite so easily. 

Then the moment is gone. She's collected herself, and pushes me away. I can't stop looking at the blood soaking into her sleeve - it's a shallow cut, barely visible in the dark brocade at all, and I've seen enough blood over the years to make it less than exciting to see more, but... 

There's something _about_ those Hellsings, you must understand. 

I have to do something other than stand there, so I half-melt into the wall because I can and because I know she'll watch me do so. My Master must be presented with the superiority of vampiric abilities at all available opportunities in order to remind her of her place in the natural order of things and the million reasons why I should make her want to turn and run. I am an impressive being. Things should be impressed with me. My grin is wide and loose and sharpened with the memory of wolves and I am not hesitant to loose it upon her.

"Your order, Master?" I break. I always break. But when she does it will have be far longer in the making and far more satisfying. 

"We're done here. Find Walter and the police girl - I'll go to the jeep to patch myself up. I haven't lost enough blood for medical attention to be necessary ," she exits and I follow before sinking through the floor entirely. And I don't mind that she didn't ask this time, - that she retreated once again to her side of the crossroads we've been stuck at for thirteen years. This is a fight I do believe that I'll win. Heh. I lowered myself to asking her once. But when it happens again she'll ask me. She'll _beg_ me for it. Even if she rebuilds her Protestant Knights it'll happen, and happen, and happen _again_ until there's just _one_ crack in that Jeanne D'Arc armor and... 

I'll just have to keep her alive until we can walk the low road together. 


End file.
